How may a carbon tax transform Australian electricity industry? A CGE analysis

The carbon tax policy proposed by Australian government has triggered deep concerns about the high electricity prices facing households and the sustainability of electricity industry. By employing a computable general equilibrium (CGE) model and an environmentally extended Social Accounting Matrix (SAM), this article simulates the effect of Australian carbon tax on the electricity industry. The modelling results show that the wholesale electricity prices indeed increase by about 90%, but the retailer prices only increase by 25%. The coal-fired electricity generators will reduce their output by 8% (for black-coal) to 18% (for brown-coal), but the profitability of the industry will drop dramatically. On the other hand, generators using oil, gas or renewable resources, will increase their output significantly and enjoy a handsome profit. Through the price, cost and profitability mechanisms, the carbon tax will transfer the Australian electricity generation to a low emission industry in the long term.     

When does aggregation reduce risk aversion?

We study the problem of risk sharing within a household or syndicate. A household shares risky prospects using a social welfare functional. We characterize the social welfare functionals such that the household is collectively less risk averse than each member, and satisfies the Pareto principle and an invariance axiom. We single out the sum of certainty equivalents as the unique member of this family which is quasiconcave over riskless allocations.     

Does a cap on the carbon price have to be a cap on green investments?

Policy makers and economists are discussing a regulatory ceiling for carbon prices, acting as a “safety valve” for the protection of regulated businesses from unexpected price surges. While the pros and cons of such a regulatory feature are widely discussed in the literature, the optimal design of such a cap and the attendant economic and environmental consequences have yet to be subjected to quantitative analyses. We employ a Monte Carlo simulation/dynamic programming approach to investigate the impact of different carbon price cap designs on an individual firm in the energy generation industry. Specifically, we model the firm’s choice between a pulverized coal combustion plant and a combined cycle gas turbine plant, a large hydropower plant, a solid biomass plant and an on-shore wind farm. Our results show that the effects of a maximum carbon price set by the regulator is largely independent of its exact characteristics, albeit not of its level. A higher cap favors low-carbon technologies in general. However, due to differences in their cost structures, a price cap has different impacts on the relative attractiveness of the specific alternative technologies investigated.     

How does governance affect tax avoidance? Evidence from shareholder proposals

I examine the effect of corporate governance on tax avoidance. Specifically, I use a regression discontinuity design to analyse the effect of governance-related shareholder proposals that pass or fail by a small percentage of votes. The passage of such proposals around the 50% threshold can be viewed as random assignment of improved governance and thus cleanly identifies a causal estimate. I find that the adoption of governance proposals decreases cash effective tax rates (ETR), which suggests that improved governance increases tax avoidance. The result contributes to our understanding of the determinants of firms’ ETR.     

How does petty corruption affect tax morale in Sub-Saharan Africa?

Revenues from taxation gain in importance to finance economic development in Sub-Saharan Africa. One obstacle to enhancing the willingness to remit taxes can be the extortion of bribes by public officials. Using micro-level data from the Afrobarometer, we show that petty corruption erodes tax morale. The effect on tax morale is more severe in countries and regions where fewer people are affected by petty corruption and becomes insignificant if extortion of bribes is particularly prevalent. Differing levels of civic participation and potential access to tax funded services are also found to induce heterogeneous reactions to corruption experience. Applying a mediation analysis, we demonstrate that petty corruption not only has a direct effect on tax morale but also diminishes confidence in tax authorities and therefore affects tax morale indirectly. The harmful effects of corruption experience, however, operate mainly through a generally lowered inclination to uphold high levels of tax morale.     

When does the cost channel pose a challenge to inflation targeting central banks?

In a sticky-price model where firms finance their production inputs, there is both a lower and an upper bound on the central bank's inflation response necessary to rule out the possibility of self-fulfilling inflation expectations. This paper shows that real wage rigidities decrease this upper bound, but coefficients in the range of those on the Taylor rule place the economy well within the determinacy region. However, when there is time-variation in the share of firms who finance their inputs (i.e. Markov-switching) then inflation targeting interest rate rules frequently result in indeterminacy, even if the central bank also targets output. Adding a nominal growth target to the policy rule can often alleviate this indeterminacy and therefore anchor inflation expectations.     

What does tax aggressiveness signal? Evidence from stock price reactions to news about tax shelter involvement

We study the stock price reaction to news about corporate tax aggressiveness. We find that, on average, a company's stock price declines when there is news about its involvement in tax shelters. We find some limited evidence for cross-sectional variation in the reaction. For example, the reaction is more negative for firms in the retail sector, suggesting that part of the reaction may be a consumer/taxpayer backlash. In addition, the reaction is less negative for firms that are viewed to be generally less tax aggressive, as proxied by the firm's cash effective tax rate. We interpret this as being consistent with the market reacting positively to evidence that a firm is trying to reduce taxes when their financial reports would lead one to believe the firm is not tax aggressive.     

When does coordination for free trade regimes fail?

This paper examines why the recent efforts to arrange free trade regimes have failed repeatedly focusing on the increased uncertainties in economic fundamentals and the asymmetric political economic characteristics of trading countries reflected in the hawkish trade retaliatory tendencies. We demonstrate that, under informational barriers due to economic uncertainties, a slight negative change in economic fundamentals as well as the signals about the economic fundamentals can lead to the collapse of free trade regimes. Moreover, the fear of a trading partner's deviation to protectionist policies might trigger preemptive protectionist measures resulting in a trade war when trade policies show strategic complementarity. However, a free trade regime is more likely to be sustained when it is commonly known that each country has strong symmetric retaliatory tendencies in case trade friction occurs. Nonetheless, if the asymmetry in retaliatory tendencies of trading countries increases the preemptive incentive, a free trade regime is more likely to collapse to a trade war.     

When does transition increase the gender wage gap?

In the context of underlying stability in female participation rates, the gender wagegap, measured by the log of monthly wages, more than doubled in Belarus from 1996 to 2006. In this respect, the country has experienced a variant of the transition which occurred in the former Soviet Union where relative female wages fell by more than female participation. We have used the Machado and Mata (2005) analysis of the gender gap distribution. This reveals that the effect of coefficients on observed characteristics in widening the gap was increasing over time, especially in the lower and middle deciles of the wage distribution. At the same time, the effect of the characteristics themselves in reducing the gap was shrinking. The decomposition of changes in the gap over time, based on Juhn et al. (1991) , confirms that the contraction of women’s relative wages has been caused both by a deterioration in the observed characteristics of female workers and by the associated remuneration. Changes in the residual wage distribution tend to slightly reduce the gap rather than, as is the case elsewhere, to increase it. The analysis carried out in line with Neuman and Oaxaca (2004) suggests that the increased gap was not caused by sample selection. Instead, two observed factors are found to be mainly responsible for the results: hours of work have increased for men more than for women and women have experienced segregation in low‐wage industries.     

When does Learning by Doing generate current losses?

We study under which conditions a learning by doing effect in the industry causes a monopolist to operate at a loss for some initial periods. Those conditions involve a parameter of the learning process, the slope of inverse demand function and the discount parameter. In order to get results, we explore the analytical solution to a T-period learning by doing model, which is also a novelty. Numerical examples are presented.     

Will a special tax on tobacco reduce lung cancer mortality? Evidence for EU countries

This article carrys out a quantitative evaluation of the effects on the health of smokers of increasing a special tobacco tax, using the mortality rate from lung cancer as an indicator. To that end, it estimates two models that relate tobacco consumption, the mortality rate and this special tax, employing data drawn from a sample made-up of 12 EU countries and covering the years 1983–1993. The results show that increasing the special tax is a useful tool for reducing lung cancer mortality. Specifically, it finds that a 10% increase will reduce the lung cancer mortality rate by 1.21% in the first year, with such a reduction implying the avoidance of 1707 deaths in the sample countries.     

Beneficial impact of tax reforms on tax revenue performances in Togo: Myth or reality?

Tax reforms are often motivated by their potential to improve tax revenue mobilization. However, their actual impacts are difficult to quantify. Using cross-country panel data over the period 2000–2021, this article evaluates the impact of the 2012 tax reforms on tax revenue performance in Togo. We follow the Synthetic Control Method (SCM) estimation procedures. After comparing the observed evolution of Togo's tax revenue output in the period 2013–2021 with that of synthetic Togo, our estimates show that an accumulated yearly average gain is about 3.09% of GDP. Hence, the article concludes that after 9 years of reform, the improvement in Togo's tax performance is remarkable. However, more tax-related and institutions-related reforms are crucial to make Togo's tax system more buoyant and sustainably improve tax revenue mobilization.     

When is FDI a capital flow?

In this paper we analyze the conditions under which a foreign direct investment (FDI) involves a net capital flow across countries. For this purpose, we investigate how multinational firms finance their foreign affiliates, globally or locally. We develop a contract theoretical model in which the financing structure is used to govern the incentives of managers. We find that the investment tends to be financed locally if managerial incentive problems are large. Thus, microeconomic governance problems may have macroeconomic implications for the net capital flow to host countries. Our results are consistent with survey data on German and Austrian investment flows of firms to Eastern Europe.     

How does stock liquidity affect corporate tax noncompliance? Evidence from China✰

Using an exogenous shock that drastically increased the liquidity of stocks listed in China, we find robust evidence that higher liquidity significantly increases the overall level of tax noncompliance. The increase is more substantial when controlling shareholders own more shares, and diversion for private benefits is less complementary to tax noncompliance. Liquidity has no significant impact on tax evasion—the most aggressive and risky tax noncompliance—and at the higher ends of the tax noncompliance distribution. The positive and significant effects are observed only at lower levels of tax noncompliance. We attribute the weaker impact of liquidity on aggressive tax noncompliance to diversion being more complementary to higher-risk tax noncompliance.     

Do your tax problems make tax evasion seem more justifiable? Evidence from a survey experiment

Taxpayers often view tax rules and filing processes as complicated. I study whether the perceived tax uncertainty among peers makes tax evasion more acceptable among the general public. I find strong supportive evidence for this hypothesis using a survey experiment and a large representative sample of the German population. Providing randomized information that others are uncertain about how to file their taxable income decreases individual support for tax compliance. This suggests that subjects judge tax evasion less harshly in response to this peer information. Studying related heterogeneous treatment effects, I find that both older and left-wing subjects are more responsive to tax uncertainty of others. Less harsh views on evasion are persistent for very high compliance levels in a follow-up survey.     

Flat tax? Maybe not a bad idea after all

This work studies the actual degree of progressivity in the Italian tax and transfer system and examines possible reforms towards the optimum. It analyzes the distribution of personal income and effective tax rates across the Italian population, computing income and tax liabilities from survey data, and studies the optimal level of progressivity. To this end, it uses a model developed in Heathcote et al. (2017) with heterogeneous agents where skill investment and labor supply are endogenous and the government provides a public good under a balanced budget. All the main tradeoffs that shape optimal progressivity appear: the presence of inequality in initial conditions and imperfect private insurance push for positive progressivity, whereas labor supply and skill investment call for regressivity. The model suggests a drastic reduction in progressivity under both the baseline and the alternative specifications. In particular, it calls for substantial reductions in marginal tax rates above approximately 0.25 times the mean income along with increased tax rates at the lower end of the income distribution. These reforms may be approximated by a flat tax at 29% under the baseline and at 32.5% under the alternative specification, holding the required positive level of progressivity constant.     

When does more aid imply less democracy? An empirical examination

Foreign aid flows have increased considerably during the last decades, targeting, apart from development objectives, goals related to democracy. In this paper we investigate whether aid has affected the political regime of recipient countries. To this end, we use annual data on Net Official Development Assistance covering 64 aid-recipients. Because of data limitations, we cover the 1967-2002 period. We find that aid flows decreased the likelihood of observing a democratic regime in a recipient country. This effect is sensitive to economic and social conditions. The negative relation between aid and democracy is moderated when aid flows are preceded by economic liberalization. Aid from the U.S. has a non-significant effect on the political regime of recipients.     

Dubious versus trustworthy faces: what difference does it make for tax compliance?

We find experimental evidence that the decision problem of tax compliance changes if subjects’ declarations are not randomly assessed, but is based on their appearance as captured by pictures of their faces, even if the aggregate audit probability does not change. Some subjects may fear that their picture looks rather dubious, whereas others may believe that their picture looks more trustworthy than average. Depending on these beliefs, they may adjust their compliance decisions. Our experimental design allows us to disentangle these potentially countervailing effects.